It wouldn't be, for Alfsluitdijk V. Santos, until having lived twenty two years of life, would he fully understand why having been given such a seemingly unusual name made the most perfect sense. When it came, it was all Alfsluitdijk could do to keep himself from smiling in tranquil understanding, and nodding inwardly in enlightenment.
It was a warm peacefulness that gradually spread throughout his existence in a slow yet deliberate certainty. Where once was doubt, now was all comprehension; where before there was nothing but questions, now there was just an overpowering sense of Correctness of Everything.
The way he viewed the entirety of his life suddenly changed, specially the previous twenty-two years and the few hours of this day prior to the knowledge becoming known to him. For the good part of the hour, he would do nothing but contemplate his younger years—the childhood, the rebellious teenage years, the bitter early adult life—and realize how he'd got everything wrong.
He would look back on those pre-school years when he was just learning to write his name. Even for a toddler, one could get a sense of how different one was based solely on the letters one was just learning to scratch in pencil onto a sheet of paper. With the familiarity to individual letters, in how they are formed and how they sound, and how, combined with other letters, they form words and make even more distinct sounds, Alfsluitdijk had an inkling that what he was told to be his name was not common among those of his pre-schooler peers.
And hearing the people around him pronounce his name—nine times out of ten they would get it wrong, and he would have to correct them. He would have to teach them patiently how each syllable was pronounced, and in the case of silent letters, not pronounced.
In his teenage years, it was not infrequent that his name became the source of constant ridicule. Long aware now that his name indeed was uncommon among his race and generation, Alfsluitdijk got teased and bullied. And not for a few instances had this cost him what good chances an average teenage boy otherwise had of starting an adolescent relationship with quite a handful of girls he admired.
Any one of those girls, unable to imagine themselves being teenage sweethearts with a boy with such a name, and much more possess the ability to correctly pronounce it, resorted to rejecting him outright.
And it was all because of the given name printed on his Certificate of Live Birth. Surely, with everything else being equal, his popularity with his peers would significantly improve had he had a much more typical name.
His college years were not much different—if not only slightly worse. If one would think that being the recipient of teasing and bullying due to one's appellation was confined in the younger years of one's academic life, in college those persisted, and in a much brutal and merciless manner. Furthermore, at the age when he was closest than he had ever been thus far to becoming a parent himself, he was aware that one of the earliest decisions a parent could make that could shape the child's future rested exclusively in their hands as they came up with the best and most appropriate name for the child. And he began to question his parents' decision: was his name the best and most appropriate one to help him be successful in life?
He was young then, and the answer he himself supplied for this question was not a positive one. Much as he loved his parents, when it came to his given name, Alfsluitdijk was bitter and angry.
But that was not until this Moment of Enlightenment when everything became clear to him.
Earlier there was a mention to the effect of how this realization gradually took hold of Alfsluitdijk's very being and changed his complete outlook in life. But was there further mention that it brought physical manifestations to his very person as well? For indeed, as the sheer correctness of his name registered in every neural connections in his brain, each individual cell in his body concurred, and in doing so, rejected the false ideas he had held since very early in life. This rejection manifested in some very small, almost imperceptible, shudders that lasted for but a blink of an eye.
At his Moment of Enlightenment, and for any other of his future moments for the rest of his life, when he again asked if his parents had made the best decision in naming him such, his answer would be a clear and undeniable "Yes".
Alfsluitdijk was the best possible name his parents could have given him at birth, and there is no better proof of it than now, at this very Moment of Enlightenment—as he receives his NBI Clearance.
